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From the Beer, Coffee, and a little DSP » Blog Archive » Asterisk on an FPGA

Over the past couple of years a few people have suggested running Asterisk on an FPGA using an embedded processor core. I must admit I had always assumed that the processor would be too slow to be useful, certainly much slower than a regular embedded processor at the same price.

However my friend Stelios Koroneos and the team at Digital OPSiS have proved me wrong! They have managed to implement Asterisk on a Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA, running a 300MHz Power PC core. These FPGAs cost about the same as an embedded processor, e.g. around $12 in Qty 1000.

I’ve been interested in FPGAs and Asterisk: it’s good to see projects that do both.

Try reading some of this drivel.

Rebel Science News

I was experimenting with APRS messaging via GO-32 this morning, after being simply overrun by Mexican hams earlier in the morning on AO-51. W7KKE runs a GO-32 SatGate in Lincoln City, Oregon (a place I’ve visited many times) and was apparently listening when I messaged him this morning via my TH-D7. I wasn’t using a computer, so it was rather like text messaging from a cheap phone, but here are the messages as recorded in my HT.

ID
ID TH-D7G
AMSG 01
AMSG 3,W7KKE-1,73s,I
AMSG 02
AMSG *,W7KKE-1,handheld here,H
AMSG 03
AMSG M,W7KKE-1,Good to see some GO-32 activity!,51
AMSG 04
AMSG 1,W7KKE-1,first qso on go32,G
AMSG 05
AMSG M,W7KKE-1,Good morning!,50
AMSG 06
AMSG *,W7KKE-1,hi ken,F
AMSG 07
AMSG 0,VA3SU-1,test,E
AMSG 08
AMSG B,4XTECH-12,D7&D700 posits use 145.9s,3
AMSG 09
AMSG B,4XTECH-12,APRS msgs and clients use 145.85 Upl,2
AMSG 10
AMSG B,4XTECH-12,su APRS!!Use pth via 4XTECH,1
AMSG 11
AMSG 0,VA3SU-1,hi there ,D

Addendum: Using the information from here, it appears that the first number after the AMSG statement is either an M (indicating that the message is Mine), a B (bulletin), an asterisk (meaning the transmission was acknowledged) or a number (indicating the number of times that it will retry to send it). You can see that my attempt to reach VA3SU was unsuccessful, but that W7KKE acked a couple of my packets.